film festival poster

↓ ”Rhett/Scarlett” or “Road to Extinction”, (430 x 270 mm + 245 x 340 mm), mixed media on cardboard.It started with a ladder, or rather with a vision of a ladder, or more precisely, depending of course on where in the process you believe associative lines of haphazardly firing axons can coalesce into ideas worthy of sticking to the inside of one’s skull, a fantasy of a DNA helix unfurling into a rigid ladder, left with one rail bent out of shape as if it’s rubber or maybe even warped by time, evidently proposing the question: what does that make our ladder; this symbol of progress, Jacobean ascension, abysmal descent, staggered regression, communication between higher and lower psyche, the connection between body and mind, self and ego? Well, here it made for an image worth exploring for a minute and before you knew it, and least of all my own consciousness knowing of it, these roaming hands of mine drew in a few overlapping circles, suggesting them to be planetary objects held in place by universal gravitational forces and/or ink on a nebulous space of paint splattered, discarded pieces of cheap cardboard (one from a not so innovatively designed packaging holding a somewhat sophisticated designer toaster, the other intended to be a short-lived partition or filler between fragile and empty glass bottles) making me go “hm” and “oh” to a point where I liked where we were going, me and my brain, together pushing more towards an interpretational regimen as opposed to just spilling our babbling beans, thinking “here’s a possible commentary, exploration on the themes of never-ending growth, the incessant urge to reach yet a final frontier never thinking about the bill somebody has to pay at some point”, and a little more meditating on the subject led to the oh so obvious addition of a domino piece, the pips counting three and two, the most sexy and sacred ciphers this side of the galaxy, indicating that behind all this there’s a conduct or code, a cultural key to that particular part of human behaviour. To round out and up that end of the game, there was no other way than to add an obscured text, a secret message (uh!) by the help of a book cipher and since I was already thinking about Arthur’s and Stanley’s thoughts about the same, I used that particular good book to quote a totally different movie classic to word my conclusion to this investigation. To help you just a bit I give you the paragraph you need here:

2001: A Space Odyssey (by Arthur C. Clarke, 1968)
Chapter 1 – The Road to Extinction:Thedrought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended. Here on the Equator, in the continent which would one day be known as Africa, the battle for existence had reached a new climax of ferocity, and the victor was not yet in sight. In this barren and desiccated land, only the small or the swift or the fierce could flourish, or even hope to survive.

↓ Untitled work in progress, (600 x 400 mm), mixed media on MDF.
It’s a sprocket. Makes a machine work, like. Somehow it still ended up looking like a flower. Now, we dance.

Finally, and at last, I got back from this dry spell of actual months without my nose in a book, where I even had these books just sitting there waiting to have their spines broken and their guts devoured, but a numbness of the mind, an inspirational limbo, a too long frozen winter of intellect […]

A: Read Disgrace. Swallowed it. Loved it. Ran immediately to see the movie wherein Malkovitch does a thing to the character that made me think twice about our main protagonist. In the movie I saw his face/value as being a corrupt egocentric I could pity with sympathy whereas in the book sympathy came first and […]